MD Communications

3D Biomedical Viz Biz Booming
Extraordinary changes biomedical and molecular visualization are creating new challenges and opportunities for researchers and animators.

By Mike de la flor

While the traditional collaboration between specially trained artists and researchers to produce scientific visualizations for research still exists, the increasing demand in quantity and quality for visualization, specifically 3D animation, is pushing scientist to become animators or to fill the lack of specially trained artists with traditional animators.

Compounding the shortage of animators is the vast market created by the fierce competition among pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies looking for slick, Hollywood-style animations that sell. As we will see, this booming demand for 3D animation in the sciences is creating a myriad of challenges and opportunities.

Visualization to Animation
RasMol, Chime and the more recent Jmol and Chimera are among the molecular visualization programs preferred by many researchers. While these programs excel at scientific analyses, their animation tools are limited, and for researchers that want to visualize molecular structures in complex interactions this limitation is a problem. To meet this challenge scientists have slowly migrated to programs with robust scripting like Maya, 3ds max, Cinema4D, and even Blender to further explore the molecular and cellular world.

3D conceptual illustration depicting various proteins, nucleotides and cell organelles created for the textbook Cell Biology, Pollard & Earnshaw, W.B. Saunders/Elsevier, 2007. © Graham Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute.

As a result a new class of researcher is becoming common; the biochemist, molecular biologist, or even grad student that is also an accomplished animator. And new university departments are being formed around the novel venture. Also animators that once rigged and animated characters but that have no training in science are finding themselves drafted into animating the complex motions of atoms, molecules, and cells.

However, the shift from molecular visualization to mainstream animation programs has posed challenges. For instance, molecular visualization programs load datasets, such as the pdb format, which contain metadata for locations of atoms, bonds, measurements, and vibrations. When the molecular models are exported in vrml and loaded into Maya for example, all metadata is lost. At this time there is no standard pipeline that preserves the scientific metadata, creating an opportunity for enterprising programmers to develop extensions for molecular visualization programs or more likely plug-ins for animation programs.

Cinematic Dazzle
One of the fastest growing sections of biomedical visualization is MOA animations. No not the extinct, flightless, bird but animations that depict Mechanisms of Action (MOA). MOA animations can show how natural molecules interact, but more often illustrate how therapeutic drugs, nano-technologies, and bioengineered products work within living organisms.

This still of a Maya animation depicts a malaria parasite infecting a red blood cell. All data derived from scientific datasets and is to scale. © Drew Berry from “Lifecycle of Malaria.”

While MOA animations got their start in academia the increased commercialization of the products of scientific research via pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies has created an immense demand for experience animators. The days of frumpy ball-and-stick or space filled models of carbon backbones and protein domains are gone as pharmaceutical companies demand polished imagery and Hollywood-style special effects to help sell their products – and they are willing to pay for it.

The demand for MOA animations has surpassed the supply of illustrators and animators with a background in science, such as freelance medical illustrators or medical illustration studios. And Big Pharma is now tapping into shops and studios whose bread and butter was as diverse as web design and broadcast effects to fill in the void.

This render showing HIV protease is an example of mainstream animation suites like 3ds max, Maya, and XSI used to visualize and animate molecular simulations. © Albert William, Indiana University School of Informatics.

The fact that commercial MOA animations are highly conceptual, often taking copious amounts of artistic license to represent the microscopic world makes the transition for traditional animators a bit easier. Nonetheless, as with any biomedical visualization, animators will often work with scientific experts to maintain some level of accuracy.

Summary
Hollywood isn’t the only employer looking for experience programmers, artists, and animators, and maybe Hollywood isn’t even where the best paying animation jobs can be found. As scientist continue to push for improved visualization for research and pharmaceutical companies with deep pockets compete to sell their products the future certainly seems bright for enterprising computer graphics professionals.

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